Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Texas Instruments announced last month that it is eliminating 1,700 jobs worldwide as it cuts spending in its wireless business. As the company's biggest smartphone and tablet customers have begun developing their own chips, Texas Instruments is shifting the focus to industrial and automotive customers. Yesterday it announced that it will lay off more than 500 people at a research and development plant near Nice, France, in the coming months. The plant was primarily dedicated to developing OPAM microprocessors used in smartphones and tablets.

The mobile phone chipmaker saw its revenue rise 29.6% year over year in 2012, while the overall market declined 3%. Of the top 10 chip vendors worldwide, only Qualcomm and No. 9 Broadcom increased their revenue this year. Both Qualcomm and Broadcom are Apple iPhone suppliers.

Qualcomm surged to become the No. 3 semiconductor vendor worldwide this year by revenue. Qualcomm bucked the industry trend and grew this year thanks to continued adoption of smartphones and the growth of 3G and LTE technology in emerging regions, such as China and India, Gartner said.

Broadcom's revenue rose 8.8%. While part of the company's year-over-year performance gain was attributed to the acquisition of NetLogic Microsystems, the highest organic growth in the company was once again achieved by the Mobile and Wireless division, which grew close to double digits. Broadcom's third division, Broadband, bounced back from a revenue decline in 2011 by growing in the mid single digits in 2012.

Chip sales are expected to bounce back in 2013. Gartner forecasts global chip revenue to rise 4.5% to $311.4 billion next years, as IBD reported.

It is expected H.265 can obtain the same quality as H.264 at half the bit rate. Cisco published a demo at Youtube to show the H.265 capability of high quality video with great bandwidth. Moreover, H,265 can cover both scenarios and support a wide range of applications, from DTH transmission to acquisition and storage.

Many initiatives are underway for greater video quality. Japan's NHK is working on Super Hi-Vision video format , a successor to the familiar high-definition broadcast system, using 4K × 2K TV with approximately four times the pixel count of Full HD. Fujitsu announced that it has developed h.264 based codec equipment for systems transmitting Super Hi-Vision (SHV) video, with resolution 16 times higher than Japan's current Full Hi-Vision video. As entering an era of video data exploding, 3D and other high-resolution imaging, video compression technology is going to be more and more important. H.265 is expected to meet this trend need.

Since technologies move so quickly, it makes it nearly impossible for broadcast engineers and designers working to get ahead of the competition to rely on application specific standard products (ASSPs) as the backbone of their hardware solutions. For this reason, Xilinx ROBERT GREEN AND AARON BEHMAN believed that FPGAs offer the only viable platform for the next several years for companies hoping to exploit advantages of HEVC, since FPGAs can support the HEVC standard in software with hardware acceleration blocks for motion estimation and CABAC/CAVLC, which enables tradeoffs in device resource and performance while promoting design productivity. They said, "Depending on the application, the ability to trade off computational complexity, compression rate, robustness of errors and processing delay time are all elements that can only be evaluated in real-time with an FPGA-based design."

Tesla Model S was named Motor Trend's 2013 Car of the Year, one of the automotive industry's most coveted awards.

Tesla was co-found by Elon Muskwho also is a co-founder of Paypal. He said, "Our aspiration with the Model S was to show that an electric car truly can be better than any gasoline car, which is a critical step towards the widespread adoption of sustainable transport. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than winning Motor Trend's Car of the Year by unanimous decision against a field of exceptional competitor." The field competitors included Porsche Boxster, BMW 3-series, Lexus GS, and Subaru BRZ.

It is very impressive that Tesla Model S will come with its 17-inch touch screen--a spectacular standard feature which, along with a smaller LCD display in front of the driver, replaces nearly all of the traditional controls and indicators short of basics such as the steering wheel and turn signals.

The Tesla S's touch-screen interface.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

According toHarry McCracken, "Tesla's screen resembles a large iPad or Android tablet--it's hard to overstate how overwhelmingly ginormous it looks--and sits in between the driver and front passenger. It has a music player, a navigation system, hand-free calling, a rear-view camera, climate controls, and other features which you might expect. It also lets you check up on the status of your car's battery, and--as you can see in the photo above--it sports a full-blown Web browser. And Tesla says that it will allow third-party apps, too." It uses Nvidia's ARM-based Tegra platform running with Linux.